By Michael Martin, Six Mile Water Trust
Angling Reflections
Another season ends and there’s time to reflect
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s a small boy I was fortunate to spend many happy times with my old dads fishing mentor, Mr. Barr, who lived just up the street from my Granda’s house in Donaldson Crescent. A veteran of WWII, ‘oul’ Barr cut a tall, lithe figure with square shoulders, advancing years forcing a slight stoop on his back. In my memory I can still hear his deep, gravelly voice and smell his aromatic pipe tobacco as he patiently imparted his knowledge to this little brother of the angle. He always wore a check shirt, frayed around the collar, a regimental tie, the battered tweed jacket with the pipe tucked in his breast pocket, and a plastic Mac – no gore-tex in those days. We spent many an hour catching perch and eels off the sand barges in the 66
canal at Toomebridge, the wee red and white float bobbing and dipping as the fish guzzled the red worm suspended below. Mr. Barr loved to eat perch and would carefully fillet the bigger ones and an eel was a delicacy. Sometimes we would go to some little tidal stream on the Ards peninsula where the red and white float would work its magic on the school seatrout and wee flatfish. Mr. Barr would fish anywhere the bus or train would take him, or on my dad’s big Vespa motorbike and, in later years, the old Morris Traveller with the Isopon-filled wooden panels. Although he liked fly fishing, the war deprived Mr. Barr of the mobility to wade the rivers, so his weapon of choice was a Mepps spinner, which he could expertly drop on a sixpence, under the
Winter 2021 Irish Country Sports and Country Life
overhanging bushes, into the back eddies, behind a big rock - anywhere a nice trout, dollaghan or salmon might have taken up station. A big flood might demand a copper and brass spoon or, if the notion took him, he would gather some dock grubs or a ‘Garden Olive’ the worm. Although his hands were damaged, he could manipulate the old Mitchell reel and glass rod with a dexterity that would have shamed most anglers. The tall figure walked with a halt and some of his fingers were missing – a legacy of the shrapnel and bullets that strafed the battlefields. The deep husky voice, breathing with damaged lungs, all reminders of weeks spent lying in wet trenches inhaling all manner of gas and fumes which permeated that
